Freedom vs. Technology

Quick: Which Amendment to the Constitution goes furthest in protecting our freedom?

Of course, there is no clear answer: The First, Fourth and Fifth all play a crucial role in maintaining that which we call freedom. The Fourth (unreasonable searches) and Fifth (self-incrimination) appear to be the most susceptible to changes from technology, and we are constantly forced to re-evaluate our stances and interpretation.

Every time we get an advance in electronic technology, it is easier for law enforcement to think, "Ah, what we could do to ferret out the criminals in our society!" However, there is usually a trade-off involving a loss of privacy for us, and it is these trade-offs that we constantly need to evaluate.

Very interesting article up at The New Yorker this morning concerning Lavabit's (Lavabit is a secure email service) brief to the 4th Circuit of Appeals to allow it to resurrect its secure email service. Lavabit was shut down by its owner and founder after the government asked that it 1) hand over its encryption keys 2) create an easily traceable system wherein every email could be used to identify sender and recipient.

While it is easy to think "but I don't do anything wrong, why should I care?" I think the analogy that the orders "constitute that a city give the police a key to every home in search of one man" places it in perspective. We routinely find criminals without going to such intrusive lengths, why should we trade our privacy? More importantly, we only have much to lose if we do so, with no proven gain to offset the loss.

Fun With Units (or I am 5.8 nanoseconds Tall)

The other morning over coffee my colleagues and I started talking about measurements, and it occurred to us that we could express our heights (or lengths) differently. All we needed were constants that would allow us to convert our commonly expressed height, in meters, into something else. Of course, we immediately thought of c, the speed of light in a vacuum, as one such constant.

Light is one of those intriguing things because its speed is a constant – no matter where you are in the universe, no matter how fast your are moving, within your (inertial) reference frame, you will always measure the same speed for light. This doesn't hold true for most other items that we measure: Sound, objects: the speed of each is always relative to our speed when we measure them. This makes light unique.

The International Bureau of Standards has defined the speed of light to be exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. As Neil Degrasse-Tyson wryly observes* 'if improvements to our means of measuring the speed of light lead to refinements, it is the length of a meter that will change, not our expression for the speed'.

So, taking my commonly expressed height in meters and dividing by c, (meters per second), the meters cross out, and you are left with a value of just seconds. 1.74 meters / 299,792,458 meters / second gives us the value of 5.8 nanoseconds (billionths of a second). This represents the time it would take a photon of light to travel from my head to my feet (or how much older my feet are by the time I observe them with my eyes.)

But, is it valid to express my height thus? I think so. Light is the only entity that moves with constant speed, and, in recognition of this fact, we are constantly redefining our other expressions of measurement from the various facets of light (we use the number of wavelengths emitted by a cesium atom to determine time, for instance, emitted wavelengths being the inverse of the speed of light and the energy of the particular atom). So, although not common, expressing my height in seconds isn't ambiguous, which is what we would want to avoid.

It is also nice in that it gives us a reminder of just how fast light moves, but that it isn't instantaneous. We could apply this to other items as well: An average 6^th grader is 5.1 nanoseconds tall, a 1^st grader almost 4.1 nanoseconds. An Olympic Swimming pool is 167 nanoseconds, a soccer field twice that.

Hoover Dam is 221 meters tall, or 737 nanoseconds tall. So, the splashes of water you see while standing on top of the dam occurred, literally, 737 nanoseconds before you see them, and have already changed shape and location by the time you become conscience of them!

Henceforth, I am 5.8 nanoseconds tall – How tall (in seconds) are you?

* Tyson. 'Death By Black Hole and other Cosmic Quandaries'

Another Term?

I had an interesting conversation with a couple of co-workers today. We were discussing the potential for changes to our country's laws to eliminate the discrimination against gays and lesbians with regards to marriage.

Now, I've a long time felt that justice should be blind, and a blind application of our current marriage laws would not even ask the gender of the applicants – just the basics: Are you currently married? Are you of age? Do you consent? (Are you not too closely related?)

However, I've also felt that the term marriage is so embedded in our lexicon, in our society that we will have to continue to use it to describe the exclusive partnership that is two people coming together to share, care for and love each other. We will continue to go to the local government to obtain our Marriage License, we will still have the overseer of our ceremony sign the Marriage Certificate to show to all that we have publicly affirmed the required vows.

What was interesting in my co-workers' view was that the term marriage is not that central to our concepts: They maintained that the majority of America would be willing to jettison the term if it meant creating equality before the law for all. That instead of having marriage and 'skim milk' unions, we could simply (for the purposes of the law) replace 'marriage' with some other term, and re-write our current laws to eliminate the discrimination of asking the applicants if they represent one of each sex.

In this implementation, 'marriage' and 'wedding' would be non-legal terms reserved for use whenever and however people wished, but the set of laws that governed co-ownership, rights of survivorship, divorce, would collectively be referred to under a separate term – we would get a 'Legal Union' License, have a 'Legal Union' Certificate signed by the proper witness.

I find this intriguing for a couple of reasons. Number one, it eliminates the the arguments of many that 'marriage' is something that cannot be defined by our democratic legal system; i.e., if we take 'marriage' out of the legal lexicon and no longer use it to refer to a set of laws, they cannot argue that we have redefined it or dirtied it, etc. Want to use 'marriage' to refer to something specific? Fine. Our laws don't recognize 'marriage' as a legal construct, so use it as you wish.

Second, I find it intriguing simply because I had not considered that it would be a possibility – that Americans were ready to remove the term from our legal system and simply move on. My co-workers give more credit to the ingrained fairness and lack of historical concern to our fellow citizens. So I am curious: Are they correct? Are we ready to just drop this whole affair, rename our laws, restore the veil of blindness to justice, and move on?

One of the unsolved points will be, of course, what terms do we use to refer to the collection of laws that currently govern the union of two individuals? I used 'Legal Union' above as place-holders only, not suggested replacements. One co-worker suggested we appeal to our Latin roots, and use terms such as 'Nodus' (Knot), Ligo (Bind), or perhaps (and our favorite): Caveo (Beware)!

Try them out! Does it work? Imagine our children going to City Hall to get their Nodus License, signing their Ligo Certificate, or perhaps, exchanging their vows in an elaborate Caveo Ceremony (after presenting their license and completing with the solemn signing of the Caveo Certificate.)

Are we ready for that? Is this really a simpler solution to moving forward towards Equality Before The Law with regards to two-person joinings? If we just sweep aside the freighted term, can we achieve the fairness we seek and believe we should give to every member of society?

Stop The Violence Fetish!

Alright. Enough. You are a fool, ethically immoral, and a purveyor of violence if you believe that death is a fair retribution for petty theft. What I don't understand is how many people I formerly thought well of have revealed their heartless, violent tendencies after the awful shooting at Sandy Hook: Those of us who reel at the though of innocent youngsters losing their lives in a pointless act, who believe that one action (of the many) that may counter such future occurrences is reasonable, considered limitations on the types of weapons that may be privately owned are suddenly under a barrage from those who see (and are posting) that violence is the solution to everything, that bigger, more lethal means are their right:
Stop.
We have been attempting for 6000 years of recorded human civilization to reduce violence, to build peaceful means of co-existing, teaching understanding, tolerance, and that the first response should not be to reach for a knife, sword, or gun.
We have attempted to build a judicial system second to none that metes fair punishment for the crimes committed, that accords all individuals equality before the law, that gives every individual the forum to argue their innocence, or at least to explain any mitigating circumstances that their fellow citizens (the jurors) should perhaps take into account when declaring guilt or innocence, that the judge should consider when declaring punishment. All that is taken away when a citizen takes it into their own hands and shoots and kills another - and is an action that we should always inspect carefully and with prejudice towards the shooter until it can be justified as an act of self-preservation.
Granted, we have much work to do: Neither the system nor the means to implement it are perfect - but that is exactly the point: We only can reduce violence in society if we err on the side of withholding our own violent actions, our own violent thoughts, and consider carefully the small (and hopefully diminishing) situations where we would allow violence.
Considered push back if we attempt to define those situations too tightly is welcome, but wholesale glorification of those who use violence inappropriately, glorification of means of inflicting extreme violence, and glorification of vigilantism is wrong and should and will be met with disapproval by the rest of us.
 There is no reason for those who wish a peaceful society to remain silent - your violence fetish needs to be called for what it is: A desire to circumvent the laws and traditions of our land, a lack of respect for your fellow citizens and for the lives of others. Your violence fetish is a desire for the return of vigilantism and an overturn of the institutions we have built in for the goal of creating a fair, just, and non-violent society. We, as the citizens of that society are speaking. Put your gun away, look at the darkness of your heart, shut your mouth, and join us in exploring means to improving the project we have started. 
We are not free when that freedom is tenuously held by the threat of violence: We are free when thoughts of violence are replaced by thoughts of mutual respect, when we move through society secure that the non-violent ideals we hold are held by those around us. We are largely there, and any Faux-Neanderthal that would take us back needs to be reminded of the accomplishments of non-violence, and of the accomplishments of the society we have built, and that the rest of us are not willing to consider a return and are fed up with those who would take us back.

Dear Paul Krugman (from Angry Bear): Please Read This About Social Security

Sometimes President Obama upsets me. Especially when he follows the illegitimate framing of the issues surrounding our budget, deficit, and debt. It is worth noting that Social Security DOES NOT contribute to the deficit, the debt, nor any real (or manufactured) budget/debt crises. If we want  to cut government spending, we need to cut UNFUNDED government spending (which is largely the cuts called out in sequestration: You know, the major cuts to the military and pentagon budgets) not FUNDED spending...

So, I particularly enjoy when real economists take the time to write it up, like this blog by Dale Coberly of Angry Bear writing about Social Security, with the hopes that it will be cross-posted by Paul Krugman who has a much wider audience. A very well supported post that shows that Social Security shouldn't even be in the discussions about budgets and deficits, etc. 

So, read the article here, but in summary (the key points!):

Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit...  

... and therefore should not be part of the "deficit reduction" hysteria.

Social Security is not going broke.

The Trust Fund is NOT Social Security. It does not matter at all when it "runs out."   

The "Eight Trillion Dollar Actuarial Deficit" can be paid for by raising the payroll tax eighty cents per week each year.

Social Security was designed...insisted upon by Roosevelt...to be worker paid: "So that no damn politician can take it away from them." 

One has to only follow the money to see where the "Big Liar's" desire to take SS: Remove it from the public's control (via the government) to private control so that a few can extract (extort) money from the flows into the fund.  

No doubt this will be much wider read if taken up by Mr. Krugman (as Angry Bear hopes!), but I am more than willing to spread the word if I can... 

As Mr Coberly closes:
The Big Lie is that "Social Security is going broke, causing huge deficits that will burden our children."
Tell the people.

Read the article, and please, Spread The Word!